Making the Most of a Writing Workshop;

or,

Out of the Workshop, Into the Laboratory

Workshops can be helpful. They can also be harmful. Some days it seems everyone has workshop horror stories: stories about rude behavior, savage “advice,” someone trying to dictate how someone else should write, writers in tears, writers enraged, friends who feel obliged to “defend” each other’s work...the kinds of experiences that led Flannery O’Connor—who attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—to write,

I don’t believe in classes where students criticize each other’s
manuscripts. Such criticism is generally composed in equal parts
of ignorance, flattery, and spite. It’s the blind leading the blind,
and it can be dangerous. A teacher who tries to impose a way of
writing on you can be dangerous too. Fortunately, most teachers
I’ve known have been too lazy to do this. In any case, you should
beware of those who appear overenergetic.

Then there’s the creaky complaint, repeated by people who haven’t spent any time in a decent writing program, that such programs lead writers to produce one particular kind of fiction—and not very good fiction, either. O’Connor, again:

In the last twenty years the colleges have been emphasizing creative
writing to such an extent that you almost feel any idiot with a
nickel’s worth of talent can emerge from a writing class able to write
a competent story. In fact, so many people can now write competent
stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of
competence. We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly.
What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this
from a writing class.

 Dare I point out a contradiction? “We want competence,” she admits. Most introductory writing classes focus on competence—and should, just as an introductory dancing class should help you avoid stepping on your partner’s feet. “But competence by itself is deadly”: overstatement, but true. No one rushes to a gallery to see competent paintings, or to a concert hall to hear a competent band. “What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.” Absolutely true. A good class might recognize, even encourage a writer’s vision, but vision can’t be taught; and all of us who have taken or taught writing classes know that a truly distinctive voice—Gertrude Stein’s, say, or Virginia Woolf’s, or Kafka’s, Nabokov’s, or Garcia-Marquez’s—might not be recognized, or welcomed. If we aren’t careful, a writing class can reduce distinctive work to familiar-looking work.

Roughly fifty years after Flannery O’Connor weighed in, Madison Smartt Bell wrote, in Narrative Design,

Fiction workshops are inherently almost incapable of recognizing
success. The fiction workshop is designed to be a fault-finding
mechanism; its purpose is to diagnose and prescribe. The inert
force of this proposition works on all the members…Whenever I pick
up a few pages without defect, I start to get very nervous. Because
my job is to find those flaws. If I don’t find flaws, I will have failed.

As for the other students, they are just as influenced by the factors
above as the teacher, and on top of that, there’s the probability
that in confronting a successfully realized piece of fiction, the classmate
has to cope with a certain amount of conscious or unconscious envy…
Take that to its logical extreme and you see that the student as
writer has been assigned the task of Sisyphus. There is no way to
ever finish anything….

 

Since then, there has been no shortage of books and essays proposing alternatives to workshops, or at least to the long-standing format that involves a teacher and a group of students discussing another student’s work while that student endures the conversation in silence. Some writing teachers have adopted Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process, which originated in dance and theater, or even more author-centered approaches. David Mura and Matthew Salesses, among others, have written about the unspoken assumptions and inequities baked into the original workshop model, the definition of “craft,” and even the use of the term “the reader” (as if it were possible to generalize about all readers). In Craft in the Real World, Salesses writes,

As craft is a set of expectations, the workshop needs to know

which expectations, whose expectations, the author wishes to engage

with, if the workshop is to imagine useful possibilities for the

story…To silence the author is to willingly misinterpret the author.

It is to insist that she must write to the workshop.

He goes on to describe several alternate approaches, and to encourage experimentation. He summarizes his argument simply: “It is time for workshop to change.”

I agree. Assuming you have experience in workshops, as a participant or teacher, it can be helpful to consider when you have found workshops most useful; when you’ve found them most frustrating; and how you can help make this a beneficial experience not just for yourself, but for everyone else. What do you want from this workshop? What do you want from your fellow participants? What kind of participant do you hope to be?

Workshop Guidelines

A workshop should be as useful as possible to as many of its participants as possible as often as possible. Ideally, everyone will leave the room each day excited about writing, with new ideas to apply to their work. Those might be ideas for a particular story, but they might also be broader ways to think about fiction and its components.

The label “writing workshop” is curious. We typically think of a workshop as a place where things are made. But if Santa ran his workshop like a writing workshop, nobody would get any toys, ever. None that worked, anyway. And the elves would not be singing. Stories do not get written in workshop.

The writing workshop is sometimes presented as a place where you can bring a draft of a story or novel to a group of fellow writers who will read it carefully and help you see where it’s working effectively, where it isn’t, and how you might fix it. That assumes a story is a like a car and the workshop is your friendly neighborhood service station. But this analogy is deeply flawed. When you take your car to a service station, the assumption is that the car was running as it should, then it wasn’t, and that it can be repaired, or returned to the state it was in. But the story you submit to workshop wasn’t working just fine; if it had been, you wouldn’t have submitted it. (A workshop is not the place to bring work you feel is finished and have no interest in revisiting.) Also: when you take your car to a service station, while different mechanics may offer different diagnoses, they aren’t likely to tell you that your Honda Civic should be a tractor, or that it would be more interesting with fewer windows. (“Spare me,” no mechanic says. “Four doors, steering wheel on the left, rubber tires—have we not all seen this a million times before?”) You and your mechanic share an understanding of what a Honda Civic is, what it can be, and what it isn’t.

The writing workshop is less like a service station than it is a place to bring cars that fell off the assembly line, or, more accurately, cars that are still being designed. For all we know, the 12-page story you bring to workshop might turn into a novella, or a chapter for a novel, or you might end up using a few of the characters in something altogether different. And even if it remains a 12-page story, it will change in ways that are by no objective standard “right,” the way a Honda Civic can be made right. Your story means to be unique. The writing workshop is not a place for repair, or correction, because fiction doesn’t get repaired or corrected.

If a writing class isn’t a workshop, what is it? Perhaps something more like a laboratory, a place where hypotheses are tested, experiments are carried out, beakers sometimes explode, fruit fly colonies hatch unexpectedly, and people stand around, examining projects in various stages, rubbing their chins, saying “Hmmm” and “What if we try this?” Occasionally, as Madison Smartt Bell warns, people enter a workshop thinking the goal is to either “approve” a draft as complete and wholly satisfactory (doesn’t happen) or to point out all of its shortcomings. But passing judgment isn’t the point. Of course, most of us are excited to read work we find interesting, surprising, moving, provocative, etc., and disappointed when the work seems hastily constructed or overly familiar. But our primary purpose is to consider what a draft is doing and what opportunities it suggests. To learn something.

Preparation

When you look at your own drafts, it’s best not to ask, in any narrow, limiting sense, “How can I fix this?” but instead to ask, “Where can I improve this?” or “How can I build on this?” The same attitude is useful in approaching someone else’s story. What is this? What’s most interesting about it? What are some exciting possibilities it suggests for the next draft?

To answer those questions thoughtfully, careful preparation is key. Reading a manuscript hurriedly just before the group meets is likely to lead to an unsatisfactory experience for everyone, especially the writer.

In what follows, the manuscript will be referred to as a story, but it might also be an excerpt, or a chapter, novella, or novel.

1)    Start by reading the story from beginning to end. Resist the urge to make notes.

2)    When you’ve finished, try to articulate what Stephen Dobyns, in “Writing the Reader’s Life,” helpfully calls the intention of the work. This is more challenging than it might sound. It’s difficult to identify with confidence the intention of a piece of writing that isn’t fully realized. Chances are good that the author has some idea of their intention for the work, but that it is still being discovered and refined.

What we aren’t trying to do: guess what the writer was thinking. Rather, we’re describing what the draft we’ve been given appears to be aiming for, based on the words on the pages—because it’s true, ultimately the story will need to stand on its own, without the author nearby to explain it.

Another reason to start by considering the story’s intention: We can only assess the effectiveness of the parts if we have some understanding of the whole. While readers might agree that a particular description is “hysterically funny,” a particular scene “shocking,” a particular character “familiar,” it’s impossible to say whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing without having considered the work’s intention. For example: “So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past” is a world-class last line—for The Great Gatsby. It would be an awkward last line for Moby Dick, and it would be an absurd last line for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The margin comment “Great line!” is not useful without consideration of the context. What does the story seem to be about? What effect or effects does it seem to mean to have on the reader? What assumptions does the writer seem to make? Who does the story seem addressed to?

We might be inclined to say a story is written for “the general reader” or even “everyone.” But that’s never the case. The language the story is written in begins to define its intended audience; then there’s its treatment of setting (If the story is set in Houston, does it describe Houston? If not, what does it seem to assume the reader knows about Houston? If it’s set in an anonymous suburb, what assumptions does it seem to expect the reader to share about suburbs?), its treatment of character, the conventions and rituals it takes for granted or treats as exotic, and so on.

So keep in mind that you may not be part of the work’s intended audience. Workshops are often gatherings of strangers: people with different backgrounds, different concerns, and different goals. Of course, each of us can respond only from our own knowledge and experience. We might say, “I’m not a scientist; I got lost in the lab scenes”; “I don’t know anything about jai alai, which may be why the descriptions of the matches felt awfully long”; “I know there are castes in India, but I was confused by the references to varna and jati”; “The depiction of the guys working on their low riders felt stereotypical; I couldn’t tell if that was the narrator’s bias showing or the story’s.” That isn’t to say the author is obliged to revise the work in response to such comments. We have no reason to demand the work speak to us, explain its terms and assumptions to us. Ultimately, that decision is up to the writer.

3)    With an idea of what the story seems to be trying to do, for whom, read it again. (Be prepared to revise your understanding of the work’s intention.) This time, make notes: on aspects of the draft that seem particularly effective as a part of the whole, as well as on aspects that seem less so. Before preparing comments for the writer, though, keep in mind that it can be tempting to mistake a draft’s most effective passages or elements for its most important ones, or the ones the rest of the work should be developed around.  We’ve all written stories that had wonderful moments early on that had to be cut from the final draft, appealing characters who turned out to be distractions, clever sentences that turned out to be too clever. Conversely, a draft’s less effective moments, or “problems”—shifts in voice or point of view, an unaccountable leap in time, an overly long scene, extended attention to a minor character—may reveal where the writer has stumbled onto something interesting. You’ve probably had the experience: the very “problem” you’ve been trying to “fix” turns out to be the key to a story you didn’t realize you needed to write. A draft’s apparent “failures” might indicate where the story is breaking free from the author’s (misguided?) plan, from what the author finds it easiest to do, or from what we’re used to reading.

4)   Finally, write comments for the author in complete sentences and paragraphs. Resist the urge to begin those comments with anything like, “I love the way this story—“ or, worse, “My problem with this story is—.” Instead, begin by describing the work to the writer as objectively as you can—like a scientist peering through a microscope, trying to report accurately what’s on the slide. “It’s ugly” won’t cut it in science class or the workshop. And while “It’s beautiful” might be intended sincerely, try to begin objectively. The goal isn’t to tell the author what they already know (“This is a story about a man who loses his job”) but what you, as a thoughtful reader, believe the story is doing (“This is a story about a man who defines himself through his work, and about how financial uncertainty can tear a family apart”).

Go on to note what you find most interesting, effective, promising, beautiful, etc. in the draft. It can be tempting to hurry through this, because it doesn’t seem necessary to explain why something good is good. It can also be difficult to explain why something is effective. But while every writer would be happy to read the comment “Great dialogue!” that isn’t particularly helpful for the author or the reader. What makes the dialogue effective? How could recognizing that help the author revise another scene where the dialogue isn’t working as well? How could it help you, in your work?

Identify a few possibilities for further exploration, development, or an alternate approach. Remember: if you identify something you feel is “wrong,” or ineffective, you’re obliged to make a suggestion. (You say a scene is sluggish? How would you energize it? You say a character feels stereotypical? How could the writer move past that conception?) If the draft seems to be in the very early stages, don’t bombard the author with dozens of concerns. Choose a few. If an apparent problem is recurrent, you can make the point generally without flagging every instance.

You may find yourself with questions you can’t answer. That’s perfectly fine. Other readers may have answers; or, perhaps even more profitably, the entire group may need to grapple with difficult questions.

The Discussion

At the outset, we need to keep in mind that to share work in progress is to make oneself vulnerable. Everyone in the room is trying to do something difficult. The workshop isn’t a competition; we’re trying to help each other. To do that, we’ll work to create and sustain an atmosphere of respect and support for the writer and seriousness about the writing.

Offering respect and support is different from offering hollow or hyperbolic praise. False praise can actually be condescending, in that it suggests the writer isn’t capable of hearing a more honest response. But recognizing the strengths of a piece of writing is as important as recognizing where it has room to grow.

1)   With all of that in mind, the discussion can begin by asking how the author prefers to make use of their time. Does he want to begin by asking us questions? By hearing our initial impressions of the piece? What follows is what we do if the author says, “I want to hear what all of you thought, before I say anything.” That’s often a good idea. It can be hard to find readers sympathetic with the difficulty of creating an original piece of fiction who will take the time to carefully articulate their understanding of what you’ve written. And once you start explaining what you want the piece to do, or thought it was doing, you’ve lost the chance to hear some of those first impressions.

That said: in most workshops, each participant gets a limited number of opportunities to have work discussed, and some of those discussions can feel brief. So it can be helpful for the writer to tell the group, “I want to hear what you think, but I know the ending is a mess; it’s just a placeholder. I can’t really write the final scene until I figure out a few more things about these characters”; or “The women from Botswana speak to each other in Tswana, and I decided not to translate their dialogue; in addition to whatever else comes up, I’m interested in how that conveys the experience of the American businessmen.” Now we can focus our attention.

2)   The group should begin by simply describing the work. If the draft is complex or potentially unclear, a summary might be called for. The group can avoid wasting time by clarifying things at the outset. In any event, the description must move beyond the obvious (so not “This is a story about a man who has lost his job” but “Ultimately, all of these people are angry, or sad, or both; and while they share some of the same fears, they all have reasons for being unable to confide in one another. While Henry thinks he is isolated in his despair, everyone in the family is hurt by what’s happened—even the dog. The loss of his job has exposed deep rifts in this family.”).

Be sure to identify the formal means of the work. These might include the story’s organization, action (events, story, plot), primary characters, secondary characters, setting, imagery, point of view, and language (diction, syntax, sentence variety) among other things. Too often, fiction workshops focus on character and event to the exclusion of other decisions the writer has made, matters of strategy or presentation.

Not all aspects of craft are equally important in every story. It’s our job to identify and focus our attention on the ones that seem most important to the particular piece and its goals. The fact that the town where a story is set isn’t named may be a distraction in one story and of no great consequence in another; if we were discussing Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” we might decide that ambiguity of setting, among many other ambiguities, is a crucial choice, one that helps determine the work’s intention.

This opening part of the discussion should lead the group to some shared understanding of what the story wants to reveal, consider, or convey. Ideally, the majority of readers will describe something like what the author had in mind; but it isn’t uncommon for different readers to have very different understandings of the work. This is good for the writer to know. While that can be frustrating, there are times when readers will receive the work in a way the writer hadn’t anticipated, but which seems worth pursuing.

If the conversation doesn’t begin by trying to recognize the work’s intention, there’s a great risk that the suggestions that follow will be suggestions for ways to make the story what each reader thinks the story should be.

In the event that readers have significantly misunderstood the work, this may be a time for the writer to intervene, so the group can focus on the cause of confusion.

4) Because Madison Smartt Bell is right—many discussions of drafts turn into fault-finding missions—the next step should be to identify passages, devices, and choices that seem most effective. Many workshops do this in a perfunctory way. There are several reasons for this. When we talk about what’s working, we tend to identify details—a sentence, a line of dialogue or description, a character’s gesture—rather than an aspect of the work. The tendency is to praise the sentence or line or description and then move on. But it is important to recognize general choices that are serving a story well—say, its modular structure, or its internal clock—even if that aspect of the story isn’t working perfectly in every detail. Recognizing effective passages or choices can also be difficult because it’s harder to explain why something that works works than it is to discuss why something that fails fails. You know your Honda Civic isn’t working because when you turn the key the engine won’t start. When your car is working well, you don’t think about it. Somewhere, though, designers, engineers, and mechanics gave a lot of thought to making your car run well. As writers, when some part of a work in progress is working well, we should consider why. (And “working well” doesn’t mean the same thing for every story, any more than “running well” means the same for a lawnmower and a Porsche.)

 5)   Now we come to the point where far too many workshop discussions begin (and, in the worst cases, end): identifying passages, devices, or choices that seem at cross-purposes with the rest of the work, or not as fully realized, clear, detailed, or graceful as they need to be. Identifying those aspects of the work that are not functioning clearly or effectively or persuasively is absolutely useful, but it is only one of many parts of the conversation; and because it is the easiest part to indulge, we must be wary of allowing it to dominate, at the expense of our other responsibilities. When discussing a draft’s shortcomings, contradictions, missed opportunities, etc., it’s important to keep in mind that we aren’t passing judgment on a final draft; our goal, always, is to be constructive.

There’s a justified taboo in workshops about being “prescriptive.” We have no business being prescriptive; the work belongs to the author. But we certainly can—and should—offer suggestions when we see opportunities for development. If several readers agree that a certain character, or scene, or decision in a story is troublesome, all of us—author included—might devote a few minutes to brainstorming solutions.

With that in mind, we can speculate about changes or additions—again, not to satisfy our own taste or preference, but in light of the work's purposes. If we remember that our job is to generate ideas, possibilities for the next draft, we won’t prescribe but suggest. For ourselves, we can generate all sorts of possibilities from the story in front of us; for the writer and the group discussion, we should restrict our suggestions to those which seem most clearly related to the work’s apparent goals, or the writer’s stated interest.

 6)   The discussion ends with an opportunity for the writer to ask final questions—or, if the author chooses, to respond to the group’s questions or suggestions.

That template is meant as a general guide, not a rigid form. In practice, a workshop conversation is likely to return to a discussion of the story’s overall effects, one person’s suggestion for an addition might remind someone else of what they think is working effectively, and so on.

Final Notes

If a workshop seems to be, with the exception of “your” time—the time when your writing is being discussed—for the benefit of others, or if preparation for workshop seems like an obligation you have to fulfill so that, in “your” time, the rest of the group will give you something—which is to say, if the preparation for workshop and the group discussion don’t somehow serve the development of your fiction—something is wrong. The question to keep in mind, always, is “What can I learn from this draft?”

That isn’t to imply that every draft is a jewel in the rough. Some drafts, we all know from experience, are a mess. Some trees in the forest need to die, fall, and rot, to nurture the others. But somewhere in the process of recognizing what the work is, considering what it could be, assessing what’s effective, determining what isn’t yet effective, and posing possibilities for its evolution, we should be able to learn something.

The ideal workshop is one where all of us leave the room eager to write.